Previews

Counter-Strike

Microsoft ropes in the big guns: PC's top FPS comes to the Xbox with a bevy of tweaks. Will it rule Live?

Spiffy:

The most popular FPS on PCs comes to the Xbox with upgraded graphics, new maps, and Xbox Live support.

Iffy:

There's essentially no single player mode -- in a console game, that might not fly. Graphics, while improved over the PC, aren't exactly groundbreaking.

Editor's Note: Before you read, click on over to FilePlanet, grab a place in line, and download our exclusive footage of this highly anticipated title.
By now it's no secret that Xbox is the console for FPS fans. Between the huge steps Microsoft has made with Xbox Live and the system's inherent PC port-ability, there are a number of top games in the genre that are either exclusive to the Xbox or markedly better on it. Chalk up another success to MS, because the company's managed to land the most popular FPS on the PC side -- Counter-Strike, which started out as a mod for Half-Life and has grown into a phenomenon all its own. Cooperating with Valve, the developer of HL, they've managed to bring a seriously tweaked version of the game to the Xbox that should send Live shooter fans into a frenzy.

Counter-Strike is a game that pits teams of terrorists against teams of counter-terrorists. As a counter-terrorist your job is to thwart the machinations of the terrorist team: they plant bombs, hold hostages, and generally try to pop a cap in your ass. As a terrorist, it's your job to plant the bombs or stop the counter-terrorists from successfully rescuing the hostages. To get you off the ground, the game includes two brief tutorial missions that provide you with a basic understanding of these mechanics.

The game boils down, then, in whatever mode you choose, into a fight between these two opposing forces. When Valve pondered how to create a single-player mode for the console crowd -- the PC version never had one -- it decided that matches versus highly evolved, computer-controlled A.I. players (yes, bots) is the way to go. If you're pondering buying this one and you don't have Xbox Live, well, don't. As cool as the AI routines are, you don't really want to rely on them to get pleasure from the title. On the other hand, the bots are intelligent enough to be a real help as your teammates, so if you don't have quite enough players to fill out a full-sized game, these excellent AIs come in handy.

Of course, System Link support is also available so you can play LAN games -- nice and speedy, and great for a team game like CS that requires cooperation. Xbox Live support via the headset will also be tasty, and as you can mix it up between terrorists and counter-terrorists and in different game modes, should remain fresh for some time. The game's emphasis on realism (if you die you die, and there are no health power-ups) means that it's a tense affair. With eight-player games on System Link and sixteen-player games on Live, firefights will be intense.

Ironically, CS was preceded by Soldier of Fortune II on Xbox. Ironic because SOFII is a lot more recent on PCs than CS, and it is essentially, shall we say, "heavily influenced" by Counter-Strike. If you liked its multiplayer play, then there's a good chance CS will be up your alley. What SOFII lacked in graphical prowess, level design, and customizability, though -- CS offers.

For one, the game has been graphically overhauled from the ground up. The game was originally a mod for Half-Life, and that's a PC game that came out in 1998; the Xbox is capable of far more than that. While the level maps are essentially the same as in the PC edition -- 20 maps are offered, 13 of which are pulled from the PC classic -- they've been entirely redone with high-res texture art and geometry tweaks to offer a substantially better-looking game world.

I didn't mean "aim for the sky" literally, champ.

When you start your game you immediately buy your own weapons, equipment, and ammunition, allowing you to customize your game how you see fit. Players can then arrange their teams with different characters concentrating on different tactics, and this is the core of the appeal to CS: the tense action -- the two teams destroying one another. Soon, console gamers will be able to experience the game that has had a stranglehold on the PC gaming community for years. It's still looking a little rough around the edges on Xbox, but the control -- modeled after Halo, of course -- is spot on, and the game's popularity cannot be argued with. Whether or not it's the phenomenon it is on PC is not assured, but there's little doubt that the Xbox Live community, so fond of FPS games, will find a lot to like here.